


Devil's Backbone

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Dark Sherlock, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-18
Updated: 2014-12-01
Packaged: 2018-02-21 16:54:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 6,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2475536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock, John, and the inexplicable desire to pick at open wounds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_“--an interesting series of events. Last year the self-acclaimed ‘consulting detective’, Sherlock Holmes, revealed to the public that he had faked his own suicide in order to abolish a crime syndicate under the figurehead of one James Moriarty. Having previously adopted the disguise of Richard Brook - a pseudonym under which popularised children’s books had been published - he attempted to denounce Holmes’s credibility as a private detective._

_“However, last Tuesday some rather enlightening evidence was disclosed by New Scotland Yard. It appears that Richard Brook - or, indeed, James Moriarty - was a real man. Sections of ‘Brook’s Paper Trail’ were published in this morning’s Guardian, suggesting that Brook had a verified date and place of birth, a sister, a legitimate marriage followed by a divorce three and a half years later and a driving license. It was also reported that the man had been hospitalised at various points throughout his life, the first being for an appendectomy when he was twelve. Brook’s NHS number has been confirmed as valid, also._

_“Any relatives or acquaintances of Richard Brook are being urged to come forward. If you have any personal information on this man, please call the direct line to the metropolitan police force, on 020 7230 1212, or email to findrichard@met.police.uk._

_“So, this brings the inevitable question: did Moriarty - through an unlikely thorough and rigorously undetectable process - intricately create an entire life for a person who never existed? Or, was Brook hired by the “dark” and “psychopathic” detective - as described by co-worker, Sally Donovan - to gain attention on mass media? Many believe his partner, John Watson, was involved as an accomplice to this seemingly motiveless crime._

_“And now to my colleague, Samantha Roberts, who is currently standing on the left bank of the river Thames. Samatha--”_


	2. Chapter 2

John picks up the remote. Two and a half seconds later the room falls quiet, interspersed by the sweeping undertone of moving traffic in the rain. 

He exhales loudly through his nose. “As if. When will they even begin to consider leaving us alone for two bloody minutes?”

“Mmm.” You are staring at the backs of your hands. 

“Richard Brook,” He scoffs, pretending he hasn’t heard you. “Richard Brook-- really. The world’s gone mad.”

You press your fingertips together just above your lips - in what some might say is a mockery of prayer - and say nothing. Something advances but it is in your peripheral vision. 

Dark. Light. Dark again. Headlights casting ghosts of shadows, projected through the glass. 

You know that the most temporary things are the most precious. 

You also know that John Watson is very precious indeed. 

You find yourself in a paradoxical quandary. It is now that you press down the small button on the stopwatch embedded in your mind; you watch the hand eat away the first few seconds and wonder absently when it will stop. 

He moves into the kitchen, cuffing a solitary fist through his hair. Lights on, kettle on; John opens the fridge. You remain in the half-darkness - the place where everything is washed in the sort of damp you can’t taste, turning yellows into greys and reds into blacks - and you watch the ceramic stage. You watch the play unfurl. He stands in the limelight with no lines to remember. Your mind stores the images of him while your eyes track his movements. You don’t try to think of anything. 

Evening light is filtering through his hair and catching on his skin, like he is covered in nets. Your thoughts are flickering somewhere behind your eyes and there don’t appear to be any words to accompany them. 

The kettle has boiled but he hasn’t noticed. It made a gentle noise, like the click of someone’s tongue on their soft palate. Hasn’t noticed you, either - watching him with something that could be mistaken for disdain. He is staring at the rain beyond the kitchen window and can probably see his own face reflected back at him a thousand times in the underbellies of a thousand raindrops. 

Light again, followed by the muted roar of stalking engines in the nighttime. Someone shouts - a man - and it sounds like they are hurt or that they are drunk. A siren, piercing yet unobtrusive in this landscape. The unexpected is always the expected. Nothing is meant to ache but everything has forgotten this rule at one point or another.

The teaspoon in his left hand taps unapologetically against the work surface. It reminds you of a clock, like it’s keeping some sense of time but the scale is backwards. The air between your mouth and the skin on your hands is the same air that he is dancing in. Through this air and his clothes and his cells and his ribcage lies his heart. Steady and beating in that cage of flesh; beating much like the spoon is. 

Dark. Light. Dark. 

Since you were four years old you have always been alone. You are alone in a room full of people. You are alone in this city because you are different and, thus, no one looks twice at you. And you are, notably, never alone in this flat. 

The spoon is. The spoon is. Hit-ting the sur-face with the sub-con-scious force of some-thing which is go-ing to die.

It occurs to you that everything has a rhythm. He makes the tea (one. only one.) and the fridge rattles in an ugly manner as he shuts the door. Spoon down, light off, don’t say a word. The outside becomes nothing more than the flash of intermittent headlights and the drone of something not quite sleeping. 

His eyes flash as he slides the door behind him and he looks past you, out at the dark. He can’t make out any shapes beyond those of these walls. In his ignorance - at this precise moment - he is beautiful.


	3. Chapter 3

You are in a house with no ceilings and John is staring at the body of a man whose every joint has been severed, save for the delicate sinews stringing him together.

He makes the image of an abandoned puppet.

Pull on his strings.

The colour of him is mottled, like he had been wandering naked in seas just slightly too cold or like a bruise had grown and spread across the whole of him like an infection. Like a disease. Perhaps that’s what death is. That’s what dying is. One fatally diseased bruise. Then you succumb. 

John is staring at the body of a man. A dead man. This man is not you.

He is not you and he is a puppet. A puppet man. 

You are staring at John. 

After seven seconds within the room - open to the sky - you could have left. You could be - now - striding down some unidentifiable london pavements as you talk brusquely to the night air, watching your words turn crystalline and disperse, while John trots beside you and calls you too many things you don’t deserve. Instead, you’re still here. Seven seconds.The chip in the wallpaper, peeling on the left hand side of the space; white face, white lips, white hands; where did all the blood go(?); a question; an answer; a section of the fibres of a thin rope; seventeen scratches; an anatomy dummy and-- and a puppet man. Seven seconds. You don’t need to be here anymore.

John is staring at a corpse and you are staring at him, at the back of his neck, at his hands, wandering through the air. 

He’s a playing a piano. He’s writing music. He’s typing. He’s writing something else. He’s mapping the veins on the underside of your wrist. 

There are people floating between you in blue or white suits (you can’t quite remember) and they’re all blind, they’re all already dead. What the point? You wonder this, often enough. Surely the only point to existence is the adrenaline of destruction. Destruct, reconstruct, tear ourselves to pieces again. How do you listen to someone else’s heartbeat with the knowledge that it could fit quite exactly in your fist? How do you watch someone else make a cup of tea with the intimate knowledge of how to kill a human in three hundred and forty-nine different ways?

You lie to yourself, if only for a moment.

It should here be noted that to lie to oneself is a hard task made even more implausible if you are lying to one Sherlock Holmes. But you do. You lie to yourself. 

You imagine everyone in the room has vanished. All the suits, all the voices, all the sounds of broken traffic and broken people, stalking the night-streets: vanished. You see yourself, you see him, and you see the scuffed marks on the bare floorboards where the puppet has been dragged away. 

He’s still staring at the floor where it used to be.

So you walk purposefully, one stride, two strides. You take him by the shoulders and grapple at his wrists. His back is against the broken plaster and his hands are draining to the colour of colder roses where they are forced above his head. It must hurt, it must hurt; he remains compliant. 

His eyes are somewhere and everywhere all at once, shuttered closed only to flutter open, staring into yours with all the power of his submission. Your hips swing away, swing back; you press yourself up against him, your head bowed so your nose is angled just against his jugular. 

You inhale.

Breathe him in.

His head would fall shamelessly back against the doorframe, his neck bared for you.

You are in control. 

You rub a line with the tip of your nose and its pathway would stand starkly out against his skin in a fluorescent yellow. You would be slow.

The line is yellow, then golden, then tearing at the seams as if the flesh wants to rupture completely apart. You follow it with your tongue. Soft stripes, soft stripes. 

Then your mouth would fall open, fascinated. Look into the pool of his eyes. Give him some silent order that neither of you really understand, but both obey. Then forward, then teeth, pressure until something gives. Your mouth would be painted red.

In your mind, you let his hands fall but he doesn’t move. His wrists sit artlessly on your shoulders. 

He is drawing in shuddering breaths and you want him to stop.

Stop it.

Stop it.

Hands that could be yours cover up the broken skin. The thumbs press inwards. Tighter and tighter. 

It’s like a butterfly in a bell jar or ankles in handcuffs or a tiger in a cage made of chicken wire or your heart under your rib cage or a hand in somebody else’s hand. 

As his palms flutter uselessly, you imagine his vision growing dark in the corners. Your eyes are in the centre, still bright. He watches you as you watch him fall into a place where there are no floors. 

It’s like here, but upside down. 

Sinking. You think it’s like watching someone drown - like watching someone you love drown - but you’re standing on the harbour or you’re standing on the beach or you’re standing on the cliff face and you can’t do a thing to save them. 

Your fingers squeeze him so artfully, so delicately towards unconsciousness. There is no sound so you make some up: a humming, quiet and highly pitched in the base of your throat; the clash of your tongue against the breakers of your teeth; the clicking, wet noises of his constricting throat; somebody’s shoes scuffing on the floorboards; the wind, loud and loud and loud and loud and loud; or perhaps nothing at all except the occasional wheeze of your thoughts. 

And then finally, when his knees gave out, you would support him with your arms and lower him gently to the floor. He’d still be warm. Solid. Your own, personal, concrete foundation. 

Then you would lie down behind his body and breathe in the scent of his hair. 

But, of course, here is the puppet again. Maybe he used to dance. John is watching him like there are secrets woven into the places between his index fingers and his thumbs. 

They’re aren’t; you’ve already checked.


	4. Chapter 4

You are in the living room. Perched. Perched on the back of your chair like a bird of prey.

Crowned Eagle. _Stephanoaetus coronatus._ Red-tailed Hawk. _Buteo jamaicensis._ Malagasy Kestrel. _Falco newtoni._

A feather. A claw. A beaded eye.

You watch him.

The loud rush of your breathing, air particles seeming to shatter on impact; the air is like knives. You’re drinking them in like hot coffee or like secrets you’re not supposed to have been told. You break the silence which can’t be labelled as comfortable, nor restricting. It’s merely a lack of sound.

His face is illuminated slightly by the light from his laptop screen. He has become sallow, bloodless. The tea by his left elbow has gone cold.

“John,” And it’s not a name. It’s not a name, it’s battle cry. It’s a harsh bark of laughter. It’s the sound of a blinking pin prick of artificially red light in a darkened room.

His eyes slide up to meet yours, then down again. He finishes his sentence - slowly. He types - slowly. He sleeps - slowly. He lives - slowly. The keys remind you of the kind of rain which follows a thunderstorm.

“Mmm?” He hums and it should be absent or distracted but it isn’t. The sensation of his attention pierces through your skull. You have him, now. Tempted and lured. The fish has bit.

“Have you--” The faltering is a fabrication. Give the illusion that you are hesitant to broach this. Make him feel uncomfortable, on the edge of a knife-point. Make him believe. “Have you. Well.”

Silence, and this time it drags, like it’s leaving slurred footprints in the mud on the mantlepiece. A different type of urgency that you resist for the falsehood of this atmosphere. This is of your creation.

A grinding noise. Something is eating away at your spinal chord.

“How many people have you killed?” You meet his eyes somewhere in the middle-ground between your bodies. You can imagine the cold press of a gun nestled in his palm. You can imagine warm blood running between his fingers as he forgets to breathe and the knife remains steadily clutched in his fist, riding it out. You can imagine his hands - tight, controlled- twisting to the right as a crack like lighting or a gunshot or an exploding tyre shudders down someone else’s neck. You imagine those hands and death in a quiet tandem, in a mutualistic relationship that - in time - has artfully learned how to dance.

What you can’t imagine is a precise statistic. They are not for you to deduce.

“Sorry?” It’s curt. You predicted this. His head is cocked slightly to the side and you are breathing ribbons.

You don’t repeat yourself, but you make the exception.

“Killed.” You lick at your upper lip, nudge it into your mouth. Something outside is getting closer, pressing harder and harder against the glass, so you turn to look at it nonchalantly. Bleak skies. Make his head spin. Make yourself unreadable. “How many people have you killed?”

Press his buttons. Pull his strings. Dance him into the palm of your hand, into the space between your incisors. Resist the urge to bite.

“I don’t- I don’t know.” His mouth has flatlined. Not life, nothing, nothing but the uninterrupted scream of a failed life-support. “I don’t--”

He stands up, presses the laptop lid shut, spins and leaves you perched on the back of your chair, staring into the floorboards.

A feather. A claw. A beaded eye.

Tonight you’ll go hungry, pretty bird.

He knocked over his mug on the way out. You hear him upstairs, his body more volatile and aggressive than usual, bashing into things. The cold tea is flooding into the rug, hungrily reaching out its claimed space; the dark patch’s territory grows with his absence. It’s like blood seeping into white bedsheets, you think aimlessly.

You sit there for a while, but you don’t record the passing of time. You let your longing for rain filter in and out of your thoughts. The clouds drift so the inside-fog of the room is lifted and the light seems to celebrate the dying of the sun. Dust floating, spinning out of and beyond reason, threaded with golden cotton.

Feet on the stairs, door open, shower on.

It’s some time later that he reemerges. You notice that they couldn’t resuscitate him. Poor man. Died on the operating table, they said. Died of coldness to the heart. The solid beep is residual in your mind.

But past the stony exterior, you notice everything. His buttoned collar. Condoms in his wallet. The sharp tang of something almost offendingly masculine. Date, which is evident from the-- No. No, not a date. Casual sex. You can see it in the set of his jaw.

“Where are you going?” Eyebrows up. Mouth downturned. As if you need to ask.

He doesn’t look at you. His feet are turned towards you. Subliminal, but telling. “Out.”

He is out, now. Gone. Washed away into the city. You stand in the kitchen with your uncomfortably stiff spine.

There is nothing in particular to look at. To notice. The light covers you and tries to throttle you, landing heavily on your skin. You remind yourself it is dying. That it is a dying sort of light. It doesn’t seem to matter.

Blazing; it licks at you like flames over a carcass. The kitchen is burning up, harsh yellow light spilling out of every crack like precise and untamed daggers, reaching for your body. You’re standing in the middle of the flames while the heat tumbles over you in waves.

Your skin is searing off, peeling and becoming distorted as it sinks beyond the haze of your vision. You can hear your bones cracking.

Motionless. Your hands are braced on the table behind you and you don’t know how they got there.

“Burn on,” You think. Or maybe you say it because the syllables resonate in your mind for a long time after, climbing even higher than the roar of the fire can. “Burn on and turn me to ashes.”

It’s better, this way. It doesn’t hurt as much.


	5. Chapter 5

You have never wanted to know someone so intimately.

This strikes you as you wake, the thought burned into the base of your skull. It throbs as you lie there.

Heavy. Insistent.

You have such little time now. Everything is slipping away unnoticed with alarming speed. Hold your knees close to your chest. Burrow deeper into yourself. Begin the descent.

The hardwood floor is cold against the soles of your feet as you sit, counting seconds.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

It reaches sixty beats and then it ticks over into the next minute, then the next.

Time is not on your side. You have no more left to waste.

Up. Stretch. A crick in your shoulders - at the top of your spine - which won’t dissipate. It just sits, malignantly, weighing down your strides. Maybe it’s the way you were sleeping. Maybe, you think, there’s something heavy swinging from a rope around your neck.

There’s a clock somewhere and you can hear it screaming.

By the time you’ve crossed the threshold into the hall you realise that your dressing gown remains pooled sadly at the foot of your bed. It would be cowardice - or inefficient, so incredibly inefficient - to return for it now. But you feel yourself in an almost overwhelming state of undress. It’s improper. It’s slightly rude to waltz shirtless into a kitchen at eight in the morning where eggs are being prepared.

You don’t stop.

Eggs. You can smell it.

It heavier, it gets heavier, a dead weight. The weight of a dead thing. Tied around your neck. All the things you could do or you have done or you will do. All your regrets and all the things you will regret.

The wallpaper of the hallway is rough against your fingertips. You stand in the doorway for a second and he’s smiling faintly because he hasn’t seen you yet. There are unquantifiable shivers breaking rank across your skin and your nipples are peaked with the cold. He moves and you don’t.

You have never wanted to know anyone so intimately and you are very, very afraid.

A few steps forward. Hesitant, now. You seem to have lost that driving force which possessed you in the hallway. Somewhere an engine is ticking over. Steam rising into the frost-ladened air, like a condensing breath which follows some sort of shout that no one could possibly have heard.

Something is hissing in a pan on the hob while the kettle is reaching its crescendo and he can’t hear you breathing.

“John,” You say but he only turns around like he expected you to be there and his eyes sing with something quite like sincerity. His hands don’t stop moving. You don’t say anything else and after a while he turns back, as if the pull of your thoughts aren’t strong enough to keep him attentive and tethered to you.

For some reason, this makes you angry. And it’s exactly what you need.

Three steps, maybe three and a half, four. You’re there. Finally the waves crest and bow and the harbour wall shatters and you press your body against the line of his back.

 

_There’s a poem. You read it once - you didn’t mean to, just stumbled across it and collected it and tried to delete it but you can’t really ever delete anything properly or to any full extent - full of things that you don’t understand or can’t bring yourself to feel. You are untouchable and, as such, you weren’t touched by this poem._

 

Something heavy. Tying your feet to cold and slightly sticky linoleum. The kitchen is still screaming because no one is paying any of it any attention.

Now necessity and flame and yours yours yours. You breathe hot and sudden into his right ear and he stiffens against you. Both of you fit. His pyjama bottoms are too long and the hem rests stubbornly under his heel. Your hands curl over his hips, his abdomen. His hair is flat on one side and his left eye is bloodshot. You can hear his breathing stutter and hitch and slip. He is precisely 0.14 metres shorter than you.

 

_But it lingers, you see._

 

Your tongue traces the shell of his ear and you follow it with a scraping of your teeth. You want to hear his pulse growing frantic in his neck but you can’t because the washing machine is too loud. Everything in this room is too loud except John Watson. John Watson isn’t loud enough. There’s a noise which is barely a noise and it rings out, shrill and clear and probably dangerous, somewhere in your head.

 

_A burden of sorts._

 

You take his body and turn him. His back must be digging uncomfortably into the work surface but he doesn’t say anything. He is confused and his eyes keep flicking into yours between resting on the floor or your left shoulder or your mouth, and he - beautifully - doesn’t protest. He doesn’t resist.

 

_In the poem, in the book, there were parts that glowed red and you remember a dead thing, a dead weight. A dead - a dead - a dead-- You think you killed it._

 

Your nose against his nose. You keep checking silently with your gaze that this is okay, that this is okay, this is okay, this is okay, is this okay-- It’s a formality. You know you have him. He doesn’t pull away. You’re breathing into his mouth now. It can’t be pleasant; you haven’t brushed your teeth. He doesn’t seem to mind.

 

_It wouldn’t go away._

 

You close the gap. It’s hot and messy but slow, as if you’re telling a story or sharing a thought with your tongue and your teeth and your ragged breathing. You’re not - you’re sowing seeds with a tenderness and care and resilience for detail. It doesn’t feel real. None of this has happened yet, you think desperately. You can feel his worn t-shirt against your bare skin.

 

_A bird._

 

Your hands are pulling him brutally closer although you weren’t aware of deciding on the motion. This is affecting him: you can feel his erection. With a modicum of surprise, you notice your own. Tight and entwined together, your bodies are like a singular rolling wave, caught locked in motion. It’s only a kiss, it’s not anything- your mouths are- this is- you are- you are- you are- don’t let this stop, you can’t let this stop, you are tightly bound to the linoleum.

 

_An albatross._


	6. Chapter 6

It’s later and you’ve learned to control your instincts, to tamp down the slight heady sensation of sickness in the pit of your bowels when you imagine stringing his sinews together and wearing him like a bloody token, or when you imagine what his pulse might taste like when it’s soaring with the adrenaline of being forced down by your hands.

John is underneath you and your elbows and your knees are growing raw from the bedsheets. Neither of you are saying anything but everything is somehow too loud and too compressed into the pocket of air between your mouths.

But there’s something more dangerous inside your veins and your mind that you can suppress - that you have suppressed - except now you can hear the roaring of it and the gnashing of its teeth. It’s surging onwards, forwards, out through your chest and your mouth and the gaps in your eyelids where the light is getting through.

You are not a safe man. He is not safe at all.

It starts with a slight contortion of your face and you’re so close to him, you’re so close to him. You, the beast. He, the hunted. Your incisors are knives and your fists are like sunlight as you tighten them in the cotton. It’s this moment though, when you feel your facade slip slightly and - if only for a few moments - you know. You know John has seen into some place of you so dark and so untouched - unexplored - that you’d foolishly always assumed it could never be unearthed so shrewdly.

Your hips are still snapping tightly as you uncoil, but now the noise is all gone and hidden away and everybody is holding his breath. In this moment of sheer idiotic complacency, you begin the slow destruction of yourselves.

Slow. Pause. Give yourself time to think. To school every surface cell into taking on the shape of someone better, someone who he believes you to be.

You want to tear him apart.

So you ease gently into him and his fingers are twisting and twisting and twisting in the bed clothes beside him and he doesn’t stop moving, he won’t stop moving and writhing and twitching and squirming and holding onto you like there’s nothing else. He won’t stop. You want him to stop.

“Be quiet and silent and pale and still,” You nearly, nearly whisper. “Let your hands go slack against my skin and stop making so much noise.”

You watch your hand move although you aren’t aware of moving it.

But it’s okay, you realise, because he doesn’t even understand.  
You place your palm against the side of his throat and press at the base of it with your thumb, just slightly. Holding him like something vulnerable with no more pressure than that of implied protection or gentle restraint. He’s still able to breathe. You’re not doing anything wrong.

The sensation of this pseudo-chokehold somehow makes his pupils bloat even larger and his mouth begins to go soft but this is just a fad, you tell yourself, it’s just a game to him. In his ignorance-- His ignorance-- It’s no longer beautiful but instead, it tastes of relief.

You want him empty under you.

Empty but solid and not at all seeing with his eyes trained on yours. You wouldn’t care about the cold and you would hold the pallidness of his skin in indifferent regard. It wouldn’t be the deathliness or his blue and pointless lips. No- Merely, it would be the fact that he was once here and now not anymore here because something, a hidden element (you) had destroyed all that is quintessentially _him_ and thus all that you deem as having purpose for the very existence that he would no longer have. In death, with his temporariness so painfully evident, he would be the most precious and valued thing or memory you had ever encountered.

So press harder, acting as though to appease his idiosyncrasy. Harder and harder, all the while inching your hips slowly deeper, down and down. Take and take and take. He must feel as though he is drowning in you.

The moment that he begins to panic is easily pinpointed. He starts to scrabble with his left hand on the sheets and his right hand scores pathways across your back and his eyes begin to adopt that hint of glassiness so, so familiar to you. You haven’t anything to say.

When he’s right on the brink of consciousness - you’re right on the brink, too - you relax your grip and pretend not to notice the sound of his mouth gulping in the air as you empty yourself into his body. You’re lost and you see him but you don’t really see him because you’re floating on chemicals and hormones and false images.

You move to touch him and pull once, twice, before he arches and comes across his stomach with his head thrown back. So human. So filthy. You wonder why everything is so complicated and often lost or extenuated in literature or in the biased imaginings of our own human condition when, in actuality, everything is so base and simple.

You shift to the side and lie alongside him. The shared eye contact you exchange is one of understanding when you know that you’re both speaking different languages. He looks at you with recovered confidence, now self-assured and comfortable. In some seconds you think he’s saying: “I’m sorry.”

In others, every exhalation speaks of denial or retraction. “I did doubt you for a moment,” His eyes seem to sing. “But I know it was only for that preoccupation. I do trust you - now. I trust you. I trust you. I trust you.” And then, very small and barely there: “Why don’t you believe me?”

He does trust you. You swirl it around your skull like wine on the soft palate. He does trust you. And yet, for that one small moment, his faith in you wavered all the same.


	7. Chapter 7

Another night; another moment; you’re trapped in both of your flaws.

There’s a sliver of light being forced between the curtains by a streetlamp outside. It burns with a kind of orange sincerity as it brushes over your skin, revealing nothing.

You find yourself wanting this: John’s eyes meeting yours in the darkness as you stroke down his belly, down, down, then up again. This surprises you. The sex was never supposed to be a focus or even a craving.

His eyes meet yours in the near-darkness, half closed and comfortable. He wouldn’t flinch as you held a scalpel above his beating heart, pressing insistently forwards with the understated sharpness of the blade. In and in.

This is serenity in the night time. A facade for other, loud and volatile things eclipsed by the suffocation of the day.

Your hands are still on his warm abdomen but your mind is gone, past the fluorescent shaft of artificially urban light and past and above and somewhere entirely surreal (but not quite).

“Oh,” You would say, and it would be more of a breath, more of an exhalation than a real word.

 

Oh,

  
Oh.

  
It slips so neatly and--

  
I can feel it, Sherlock.

  
You’re so warm.

  
Am I bleeding yet?

  
No.

  
Flesh wound. Superficial. You’re not-

  
-deep enough, I know.

  
I do trust you.

  
That’s what your eyes keep saying.

  
It doesn’t even--

  
Or at least, what your mouth reiterates--

  
\--hurt all that much.

  
\--when your eyes are saying something--

  
I suppose--

  
\--entirely different.

  
\--that’s the-

  
-shock? Yes it is.

  
But I still trust you.

  
Don’t.

  
When will I lose consciousness?

  
You won’t. Not here.

  
Not in this place, no.

  
In and in and in and in.

  
And in.

  
Do you ever stop?

  
Like birds in a ribcage or--

  
When do you end, where do you--

  
\--a hand grenade in a lion’s mouth--

  
\--start being me and not you, or--

  
\--with the pin un-clipped.

  
\--how many more breaths of yours--

  
Here, in this place, I want--

  
\--is it possible to count?

  
\--I. I don’t know. I want you to destroy me.

  
Let me. Let me do that.

  
You can’t. Not here, anyway.

  
Why? They won’t let me.

  
 _Why?_ Am I bleeding yet?

  
No.

  
I won’t. I won’t bleed.

  
That’s why.

  
Yes.

  
The knife-

  
-I think it’s a scalpel. You said scalpel at the start.

  
Did I?

  
Did you?

  
Scalpel, or- knife.

  
Or tooth.

  
Or fingertip.

  
Or match, when struck-

  
-makes a hollow flame.

  
Or raw wire.

  
Or my bare hands.

  
Or-

  
What does it matter?

  
It doesn’t.

  
You know-

  
I don’t, actually.

  
-sometimes I want you to panic.

  
I could panic now, if you wanted.

  
But other times I want you like this.

  
This?

  
So complacent, so--

  
You find yourself endeared towards my complacency?

  
Yes. No. Not only that but--

  
My indifference?

  
Sometimes, but mostly--

  
My willingness for you to feel those caverns of me-

  
Yes. You could say that.

  
-so untouched, so-- virgin?

  
No. This isn’t sexual-- Not virgin, not-- Just you.

  
Just me? Endeared towards me.

  
And your conversational readiness.

  
My con-ver-sat-ional-read-i-ness.

  
While I sit here and destroy-

  
Me?

  
-everything that makes you a whole.

  
But I’m not. Not right now. Not here.

  
No. You’re not. You're not being destroyed.

  
So why are we-

  
-here? Because it’s better than other things.

  
You want to see me fail and fail and fail-

  
-and slowly fail to exist and see and be, yes.

  
But you can’t. Not here.

  
Because we’re talking.

  
And, although you enjoy my conversational readiness-

  
-sometimes-

  
-sometimes, you want me to panic.

  
Panic, yes-

 

but only because there is any real prospect-

 

-of an ending?

  
Yes. Go back.

  
Go back?

  
Go back to him.

  
To you, you mean.

  
No. To him. We’re not the same.

  
Why?

  
Because-

  
-because-

  
-because one day he will not exist.

  
You won’t exist-

  
-but only when you no longer exist.

  
And only then-

  
-and only then, because there is no point in me.

  
So--

  
Go back.

  
To him?

  
To him.

  
Because there’s not much time.

  
Exactly. Because there’s not much time.

 

Your hands, roaming the soft skin. You wonder what it would feel like to reach in, break his ribcage apart like you were performing open heart surgery and hold the fatty organ in your fist as it pumped and pumped and pumped and pumped and then- didn’t. You wonder if the rate of it would increase or decrease as more blood found it’s way onto his skin and you traced red patterns with your fingertips.

Would he panic? He’s here to ask.

You mistake the streetlamp for sunlight and feel yourself vulnerable. You only touch him because you want to to keep him, and you only keep him because you want to consume him and shatter him and dismantle him atom by atom.

His eyes wouldn’t leave yours the entire time. Would he panic? Would he lie complacent? His eyes, half-mast and as soft as they are now. You want to destroy him so infinitely and so beautifully, to unravel him completely in the most extensive and purest of ways. To watch the light trickle out of his eyes as he - the man - is slowly extinguished, not at all in the manner of a phosphorescent orange being subverted by the sun but instead, replaced by a very particular kind of black.

Ultimately, there is a flaw.

A flaw that, of course, you are now incapable of factoring in to your final decisions. You pressed a switch and the hands started roaming and with that momentum and new-found life and energy you started this thing. With constant noise and apathy it doesn’t stop - and won’t stop - until all the seconds and minutes and hours of an unknown duration have been consumed and all the doors have been shut.

You know that with this dishevelment of inconsistent life, despite all of it’s apparent perfection, there would be no John Watson left at the end of it.

“How tragic,” You imagine someone saying. “Such a waste.”

“How radiant,” You would reply. “And yes, such a terrible, beautiful waste.”


End file.
